Dev Jam #14 – SIMMONS ON SPEED BOOSTING

THE NEED FOR SPEED

You want speed, we’re giving you speed. More speed than ever before in Robocraft. Yes, we’ve completely reworked how speed works by adding a new Speed Boost system which comes with a couple of new stats in the HUD as shown in the image below:

GLOBAL SPEED CHANGES

We’ve removed the ‘global-speed-cap’, so there is no arbitrary global limiter to speed anymore

Adding more mass no longer reduces your Top Speed (it still adds inertia and momentum so it still affects your acceleration and deceleration but does not reduce Top Speed)

We’ve removed ‘Diminishing returns’ on Movement Parts too as it was no longer relevant

Hybrids no longer move at the speed of the slowest part, i.e. Wheels + Tanks will move faster than before as the wheels actually make the tanks faster

BASE SPEED + SPEED BOOST %

Each type of Movement Part (i.e. Wheels, Hovers, Tanks, etc.) has a Base Speed and a Speed Boost

The Base Speed is the speed it goes by default

The Speed Boost adds a % extra speed to all parts in your Robot

Think of it like the Health Boost system, but for speed

All parts of the same type (i.e. Wheels) have the same Base Speed, but the higher rarities have more Speed Boost (so the biggest wheels go fastest, as they do now)

Thrusters and Propellers have the lowest Base Speeds but by far the highest Speed Boost (per CPU spent)

Speed Boost is applied in the direction of travel, so if you have loads of Thrusters pointing forwards and none backwards, you will go faster forwards than you do backwards (same applies to sideways and up and down too)

Both Base Speed and Speed Boost stats are shown updating in real-time as you add and remove parts during Build Mode

Previously, if you’d built a wheeled Robot with some of the largest wheels and then added some small wheels, the small wheels would have reduced your top speed.

With this new system the small wheels will not reduce your top speed so you are free to add them without compromising your Robot – go build that battle dragster if you wish

HYBRIDS

Previously if you built a hybrid the Robot would have moved at the speed of the lowest common denominator (i.e. slowest part)

For example, a Wheel and Tank hybrid would have moved at the speed of the Tank Track

The new system generates a ‘weighted average’ speed based on the amount of CPU spent on each type of part, so adding Wheels to your Tank makes the Tanks go faster

This works with all combinations of movement part (except Thrusters and Propellers, see below)

THRUST AND PROPELLERS

Still apply all the same forces they did before, so you can use them for increased agility etc.

Propellers still deliver massively higher forces than Thrusters, but have less Speed Boost per CPU and have a spin-up-time as they always have

Unlike other Hybrids, adding Thrusters and Propellers does not reduce your overall Base Speed, i.e. your average Base Speed does not reduce when you spend CPU on Thrusters

SOME OTHER THINGS

Tank Tracks and Mech Legs will now have Health Boost incorporated to compensate for their reduced speed

Carry Mass is still applied to the parts ability to ‘carry mass’, i.e. you will not be able to lift an aircraft with your Wings if you have more Mass than your Wings are able to carry. Same applies to Hovers, Rotors and Rudders

NEW STATS

With the removal of ‘adding mass reduces your top speed’ Wheels and Sprinters got a big buff. Also, with huge new maximum speeds being achievable with the additional of Speed Boost we’ve had to make some changes to the Base Speeds. Our goal is to add loads more depth into the build system and loads more freedom and diversity without elevating the net average speed massively in game (we expect some elevation but don’t want it to go too far). With that in mind, here are the numbers you can expect on release day (although there may be some late changes, this is what they are at the time of writing):

NOTE: There are changes to what was originally published and these are highlighted in red

UPDATE (26/07/17):When we published our Speed Boost Dev Jam (#14), some players were concerned that increasing your base speed was more efficient than stacking speed boosts. For example, adding a small Rudder on a Mech gave a higher overall speed increase than simply adding an epic Thruster.

Our short-term solution for this is to reduce the amount of base speed increase for hybrids so that a Mech would prefer a thruster over a rudder. We have reduced it by quite a bit for now (20 times from the previous value). Hopefully in the future we will find a more permanent solution to make the base speed increase more noticeable for hybrids.